During sales, pre-sales and/or bid preparation, a solutioning team collaboratively creates work products depicting an enterprise solution to be proposed as part of the bid. The input to the process can be a request for response, intent, tender or some form of opportunity description. Based on this input, the team creates work products such as a proposal, which outlines the technical solution, assumptions, value propositions, etc. The team can also create work products such as a staffing plan and other estimates, as well as a risk assessment.
Information needs of the solutioning practitioners can be particularly intense. Thus, effectively harvesting the information created in past bids and contextually providing the same in future bids can be of much value. In existing approaches, teams rely on personal contacts for assistance and recommendations, while available search capabilities in data warehouses that archive solutioning information are limited to simple keyword searches on documents. However, content recommendations can be potentially disadvantageous if the recommendations are not targeted and/or precise.
Additionally, in multi-vendor bid preparation (within or across organizations), while individual units can offer precision in their sales configurations, integration among those is often lacking, resulting in low precision in the overall solution, a long cycle time, operational inefficiency during solutioning, and reduced win rate. There can also exist a large amount of unstructured information created, modified and shared amongst teams via informal dialogs, phone calls, emails, etc. over the solutioning engagement lifecycle. Further, a variety of individuals involved in the system often need a varied level of traceability on how other individuals arrive at decisions during the opportunity-to-order process.
Accordingly, a need exists to industrialize the way client needs are addressed in the design of various components of an integrated enterprise solution.